


the actual in-game explanation for Shiva Unreal

by heget



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Gen, Humor, One-sided pining, a snapshot of the moment before a disaster (said disaster is a man getting stepped on), estinien/ysayle if you squint and tilt your head, off-screen but plot revolves around Ysyale-Shiva
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:40:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26691565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heget/pseuds/heget
Summary: The primal summoning equivalent of trying to appease an angry girlfriend by buying a large stuffed animal and box of chocolate. Or doing exactly that.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	the actual in-game explanation for Shiva Unreal

**Author's Note:**

> You can read this as platonic or romantic if you wish. ~~romantic~~ After a plot development in Garlemald during 5.0 happened, then the announcement of the Shiva Unreal Trial, well, I knew who to blame.

Though he mocked the church knights and sanctimonious priests as being too concerned with heresy instead of the practical realities of a physical war, Estinien Wrymblood is a devout man. Peace does not remove his ability to wield a spear, even if his enemies are no longer foes; his hands still know how to fight as a dragoon. The same for prayer. And if the ice goddess he prays to is not the one of his youth, well, circumstances have changed.

He prays before a brazier emitting thick purple smoke, the stench of the burning yak skins as noxious as before. Prospective heretics had summoned her thus before, looking to escape their old lives, to join her following. Her messianic fervor attracted many, but not him. Not back then.

The offerings are piled high between him and the fire, a veritable mountain of stuffed animals and other soft and cute objects that he had gathered in his new travels. Dozens of toy moogles and kittens in periwinkle coats, windup ponies, paissas in funny hats, dragons stitched with white velvet, and long haired dolls. (Not the one that looks like him, though. He's a fool, but not that foolish.) She had cooed over fluffy monsters before. They should move her heart again.

He had not been the only man buying stuffed toys to sway a potential lover at the new market stall in the Firmament. The rebuilding of the city, homes for the poorest to no longer freeze in the snow, that would please her even more than the fuzziness.

The dragon child beside him flutters his wings in boredom. “It smells,” Orn Khai complains. The food for bribery has long run out. “This is silly; it won’t work.” The tiny dragon likes to stress that he is almost a thousand years old, but he is so small, a child to the man’s eyes no matter the protestations that Estinien is but a mewing babe to the dragon’s long years. Before the end of the war, he would have seen this white scaled boy as nothing but an enemy to slay. She died for this peace, for this change of heart, so that they no longer see each other as enemies.

“You’re staying,” Estinien tells the dragon, the boy so much like the other boy he helped, the one that she befriended and loved too. “You’re providing testimonials of my -no, our, everything’s- change for the better.”

And maybe he is planning on using the dragon child as a shield. This summoning is dangerous and reckless. When she returns, goddess in a mortal woman’s flesh, she can yell at his foolishness. She always looked at him with cold disdain, thought him a deluded enemy. As he did to her. Until the end. And then it was too late. This is why he prays, so that those pale cold eyes glare at him once more.

He was there when the enemy returned from the dead using an artificial version of her Echo. Ascians and Zenos and frankly it does not surprise him, the former host to Nidhogg's shade. But now he knew that this was a thing, Echo users returned from the dead. And primal gods were constantly re-summoned. Shiva will return, as every other primal has, the only uncertainty of where and when. He watched her die once, an explosion of a million shards of ice each glittering like glass. But now he knew it was not permanent.

She was stubborn, and so is he. And he knows how to pray.

If the peace that she fought for, died for, is to last longer than a winter’s night of snow, they need her. With the Warrior of Light reoccupied with saving another world and the Scions gone, even if they return, the dangers, the calamities, loom. He, selfishly, wants her back. Shiva, Ysayle. And most of all wants her to not hate him, to not be the first enemy she freezes and shatters, when she inevitably returns.

Should he have included chocolates? Was this enough stuffed animals? 

**Author's Note:**

> Orn Khai is the Dravanian equivalent of Alphinaud.


End file.
